Omari's Blog

MCA Denver is exhibiting the art of Matthew Buckingham. I was touched by something he wrote which appeared in a pamphlet accompanying the exhibition:

My favorite definition of science is "the search for new forms of ignorance." Each piece of new information, pleasing as it may be, also points to the gaping holes in our understanding that surround it--to an endless chain of unknowing. The architect and architectural historian, Mark Wigley, similarly defines an architect as "a person who does not know what architecture is." I think it is useful to extend this sense of intelligent unknowing to the context of art, a field that has become infinitely flexible, constantly defined and redefined by those who use it. If artists and viewers are not exactly sure what art is, we all have to evaluate what we see more closely and carefully. When bringing methods and strategies from other disciplines such as history and sociology, or photojournalism and documentary film into the art context, we have the chance to rethink the capacity and role of both art and the other disciplines. By examining ways that the past appears in the present, I hope to scrutinize how historical representations affect our definition of the present moment. I work with space, real and imaginary, to try to create physical and social contexts that encourage viewers to question received ideas--often the things that are most familiar to us. I don't think of artists as people "who create" but instead, as the artist Jimmie Durham says, as people who change things. When an artist "makes" something "...the amount of matter in the universe remains the same." The important questions are: why did the artist make those changes and what does it have to do with me?

posted at: 16:09 | path: / | permanent link to this entry